North Bay-Mattawa Conservation Authority

Assessment Report

The primary goal of the Clean Water Act is to protect sources of municipal drinking water from contamination and overuse. In order to properly protect drinking water, we need to understand what is going on in the surrounding watershed - both above ground as surface water and below ground as groundwater. The Assessment Report is a locally developed, technical document that provides the scientific foundation for the source protection planning process and was the foundation of the development of theSource Protection Plan. One of its objectives is to identify activities that would be significant drinking water threats as defined in theTables of Drinking Water Threats(2 mb).

The Assessment Report (AR) is a living document that is updated as needed. The original Assessment Report was submitted to the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change (MOECC) in October 2010 and approved by the Minister in May 2011. The Draft Updated Assessment Report was posted on January 17, 2014 for a 30-day public consultation period, submitted to the MOECC for review on March 3, 2014 and approved by MOECC on February 10, 2015.

Updates in the Approved Assessment Report include the following:

Removal of all references to the cluster of private wells in Trout Creek to be consistent with a change in the Terms of Reference ordered by the Minister of the Environment;

Revisions to the number of existing significant threat activities following field investigations in Mattawa and the Callander Issue Contributing Area (ICA);

Text changes to the work plan for the Callander Issue Contributing Area to reflect completion of a phosphorus budget and identification of the need to refine the ICA boundaries to incorporate flow direction using recently acquired elevation data; and

The need for further information to assess the risk posed by the transportation of crude oil through the proposed TransCanada Energy East pipeline.